100% Serious.

So I decided I’m going to do this blog again through Lent! It’s been a cool way for me to be creative and silly and put myself out there every day.

I called this blog “10% serious” because that’s what I want it to be. Like mostly irrelevant, random topics that I reflect on with (hopefully) some wit.

Tomorrow I’ll be 10% serious though, because today I feel 100% serious.

I’ve been queasy and sad all day after hearing about the school shooting in Florida. I have a lot of complicated thoughts and opinions and fears about it (and all of the other school shootings as of late).

Here’s a bullet point list in no particular order:

• I struggle to want to say anything at all, because after each tragedy it seems like there’s a cacophony of words and thoughts, and what can I really contribute? And does one more voice just make it louder? Or unhelpful?
• I decided I’d write this because I don’t think I will sleep until I have words not just spinning in my head, and I really need to sleep. And, I also decided to write this because it’s the right amount of vulnerable, and that’s one reason for this blog. And also, because I have people in my life that I look to via FB for wisdom when something happens in the world and I don’t know how to make sense of it, and I’m sure they have no idea. The small chance I might be one of those kind of people to someone else, it’s worth saying.
• I prayed today and I thought about the students, the moms and dads, teachers, those who had to witness a kind of terror I hope I never know.
• I hugged my baby and cried because life is fragile and the world is scary and I feel helpless in protecting him.
• It’s not the first time I hugged Aaron and cried because of a mass shooting. It’s happened several times. He’s only a year old.
• He’s going to go to school one day. And I’m afraid.
• Why do AR-15 rifles exist? Who needs them?
• What makes a 19 year old do something like this?
• I get why people are so quick to jump to mental illness being the culprit, because we cannot (/do not want to) fathom this kind of violence and cruelty being a meditated choice.
• Can our country do more to support people who struggle with mental illness?
• There are many factors and many things we must address to make a safer world. I don’t think I know all of them. This is a complex world.
• ONLY thinking and praying is incomplete and seems trite.
• I care WAY more about my kid’s (and all of our kids and people, really) safety than your access to a type of gun that can kill so many in such a short amount of time.
• My husband hunts. He’s a responsible gun owner. I’m not against guns
• I don’t know anyone who is begging for gun policy changes means that we should simply ban all the guns? Why is it always perceived that way?
• I don’t know how our country hasn’t changed anything. Why is it so impossible to create some laws to restrict access to military style weapons?
• Our country needs more love and care and faith and grace and a sense of worth and community.
• This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX4qUsgHa4Y It’s outdated, but it’s still informative and helpful.
• When there was the shooting in Las Vegas, I called and sent emails to my senators. I got a response from Ron Johnson, who responded a month later, and in that time there was another mass shooting in Texas. In a church. I’m going to keep writing and calling, even though it feels like I’m doing nothing.
• I often have my professor’s voice in my head (Andy Root), talking about this postmodern world we live in, and how with the access to more information, and the collapsing of time and space, the sense of risk goes up. It’s not that the world is actually more risky, it’s that we simply know about real life examples of the kind of horrible things that can happen, and therefore are more cautious, more fearful, see the world with so much more risk, etc. (i.e. Grandparents talking about getting to play outside all day without supervision, and parents today wouldn’t dream of doing that.) Is the world actually scarier or do we just think the world is scarier? Today though, I think the world is really just scarier.        
• It’s really tempting to turn off the news and close my ears and eyes.
• Sometimes I have to, because it’s too much to really imagine and think about. There’s a kind of numbness in that, and I’m not proud of it.
• I appreciate the “it’s a heart issue” response to this kind of horror, and I agree.
• I just don’t think it’s ONLY a heart issue. It’s also a gun issue.
• I feel uncomfortable talking about people’s grief and heartache, their very raw grief and heartache, and using it for debate.
• I also don’t know when else we would talk about gun policy reform with a sense of urgency and that it’s personal. When we wait, we’re pretty good at compartmentalizing it somewhere way down deep or outside of us, so that it doesn’t feel like it’s all that pressing to make changes.
• Everytime we hear about another mass shooting, especially school shooting, I think something is chipped away in us, and collectively, that grief and fear does something to us as a nation.
• I don’t understand the resigned position that even if we make changes to gun policies and restrict access to military style weapons, that it won’t stop criminals from getting them. That doesn’t stop us from making any other law to protect us? And also, less access is still better.
• I believe in God. My life’s work is grounded in the fact that I think that believing you are deeply loved by God changes your life. To know that we have purpose and freedom and grace and value, I really think that could change the world.
• But also, countries that are far more secular than ours don’t have the kind of problem with gun violence that we do.
• More people with guns doesn’t make us safer. Statistically it really doesn’t make us safer.
• I thought about the shooter’s mom. I don’t know anything about his life or his story or his mom, but I assumed he had one or has one. Could she ever have imagined this day when she held him in her arms?
• Please dear God, let me raise a boy who is kind and gentle and who couldn’t do something like this.
• I could write for like six more pages but I’ll stop now.

Tomorrow, we’ll be back to our regular programmed irreverence.